Chapter Two Thousand Sixty-Six
7th June 1971
Plänterwald, Berlin
The signs on the quay either said Mooring by Permit Only and, Warning, High Security Zone, No Trespassing which meant that the ML Meta was one of the few craft that moored here when she wasn’t across the river, stored in a marina as she had often been over the years. Kiki was thinking about this as she helped Gregor Kirchhoff tie the Meta up to the quay just a stone’s throw from her front door. They had gone to Spandau to retrieve her that morning and Kiki had enjoyed the trip back. She had always found the task of piloting the Meta cathartic, even when she needed to bring her security and Gregor along.
While the rest of the world was looking at recent events in Los Angeles in voyeuristic horror, Kiki only cared about how she was getting her boat back today. Charlotte had asked her about what had happened, mostly because Kiki had visited Los Angeles last year when she had toured America with Benjamin. Of course, she had no insights about what had happened beyond what she had heard on the news. A student who had been expelled from the school a few days earlier had returned and shot up the place in a fit of mindless, incoherent rage that had left ten dead and dozens more injured.
Charlotte, being a Social Worker, had pointed out that there was no way that it was as simple as the American Press was making it sound. Kiki wasn’t so sure. She had seen that form of homicidal rage before in the form of Mithras and his Jacobin followers. The chilling part was that the police had never caught whoever had perpetrated a massacre in Mitte similar to the one that had just happened Los Angeles four years ago. All evidence pointed to it having been one of the Jacobins who had done it, but the trail had gone cold due to the well-executed plan of the perpetrator.
The only conclusion was that for the good of society, some people needed to be locked away from it. The Americans being Americans, they were not satisfied with merely locking someone up. Governor Nixon of California had already announced that he and Attorney General of the State of California were pushing for the maximum penalty under the Law. In this case that would be Death, a practice that Kiki considered completely barbaric. The only aspect of the case that Kiki found remotely interesting was that she recognized that Richard Valenzuela, someone she considered a friend, had been involved somehow.
Retrieving the Meta was something that had proven to be a bit thornier than she had realized because she had inadvertently stepped into the middle of a fairly major political issue. Recently, an article about the Meta had run in a boating magazine, afterwards Kiki had been contacted by two groups with competing philosophies. One was a group of boating enthusiasts who felt that the inland waterways should be opened to more than just commerce. The current regulatory regime was too onerous and created too high a bar for entry. They had been trying to get the Government to create a system in Germany along the lines of what already existed, and worked, in France and the Low Countries. The other was composed of Government Officials from a host of Ministries. Finance, Interior, Economics and Energy, Labor, Environment, just to name the major ones. It was the Government’s position that if it floated and had an engine, it needed to be duly registered, the owner/operator should be licensed and be able to produce the necessary paperwork when asked.
Kiki felt that both sides were correct in turns. She also understood that were far larger questions tied up in the debate. The waterways were a part of the commons. The canals with the locks, dams, and aqueducts that linked together the naturally formed were all maintained at taxpayer expense. So, who had the right to use them? Looking out across the waters of the Spree, Kiki could see a pair of tugboats pushing and towing a number of unpowered barges hauling mounds of something covered in tarps up the river. A Péniche that looked like it was running entirely on ballast was going in the opposite direction. Both were examples of commercial use of the river. There were also a handful of Speedboats or Motor Barges plying the water at any given time. How many of them were being operated by someone breaking the rules for a bit of fun or an escape from everyday life? Kiki remembered that that had been her mindset when she had bought the Meta, the rules had not even been a consideration for her. Fortunately, she hadn’t got caught on that odd trip up the Rhine to the Danube and Prague. Only later had she gotten things straightened out, but she had resources that ordinary people did not have. That was why she had been able to gain certification very swiftly, something that would have taken years for most, if they could have managed it at all.
At that moment, a motorboat came around the bend and Kiki saw that there were men aboard pointing telephoto camera lenses at her. Since the Government was so keen on regulating just who was on the waterways, they could start with them, Kiki thought to herself as she made sure to keep the bulk of the Meta between herself and them.
“Friends of yours Ma’am?” Gregor asked when he saw what Kiki was doing and getting a withering look in return. He had been a pilot driving one of the tugs that ran the barges up and down the rivers for years before he had been referred to Kiki a few months earlier to help her with the Meta and presumably the larger barge that would replace her in the near future. It was clear that he didn’t care who Kiki was, often finding the hoops she had to jump through as a Princess to be a form of dark comedy.
It was one of the reasons she liked working with Gregor.
